There are more things in heaven and earth

March 31, 2008

In 2001, a now-famous paper titled Autism: a novel form of mercury poisoning (PDF) was published in the journal Medical Hypotheses. It described the many, many similarities between the symptoms of mercury poisoning in the literature and the symptoms of autism (or autistic spectrum disorders). Developmental delays and learning disorders can also be caused by lead, aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, and so forth. But mercury is about as neurotoxic as it gets, and a certain generation of children received enormous amounts of organic mercury in their vaccines. [For several articles relating the increase in autism to the increase in mercury from vaccines, see the work of Drs. Mark and David Geier.]

I've heard people say "Well, if mercury in vaccines caused autism, why don't all vaccinated kids have autism?" That's like saying "Well, if smoking causes lung cancer, then why don't all smokers get lung cancer?" Genetic predisposition, risk factors, and protective factors explain why only some smokers get lung cancer, and only some mercury-poisoned children get autism.

While the mainstream medical community plugs its ears and sings LA LA LA in a display of determined ignorance, a community of parents and physicians have set about solving the puzzle of autism and reversing autism in many children. These kids have heavy metals poisoning, not necessarily because their exposure was higher than other kids', but because they could not excrete the metals. They couldn't get rid of the stuff.

For instance, people normally excrete metals in their hair. "Neurotypical" kids show some mercury if you analyze a hair sample. Autistic kids, though, usually have very low or occasionally undetectable levels of mercury, because metals are not leaving their bodies properly. In one study, mercury levels in the hair samples of autistic children were 0.47 ppm on average, compared to 3.63 ppm in hair from healthy children. In other words, the healthy kids were excreting close to 8 times more mercury than the autistic kids. However, the study also found that the mothers of autistic children had significantly higher mercury exposures during pregnancy than moms of healthy kids. So we know the autistic kids were exposed to more mercury, and yet, they had less mercury in their hair. This is exactly what we would expect, because autistic children do not readily excrete toxic metals.

The mainstream media widely misreported this study as proof that mercury
couldn't be the cause of autism, because autistic kids' hair showed less mercury. This was deliberately misleading. Yes, their hair contains less mercury, because their mercury is trapped in their bodies, especially the brain. You might also find less mercury in urine samples, but this is not a good thing. It means the mercury is stuck somewhere, such as the nervous system.

You may read that at certain scheduled vaccinations the mercury exposure exceeded EPA safety guidelines by 80 times or 120 times (those are real estimates, alas). But the EPA is certainly not assuming that the mercury you are exposed to in the environment is going to be injected straight into your bloodstream. The EPA is concerned about, for instance, mercury-contaminated fish. But if you eat mercury, that's not anywhere near as bad as having the stuff injected. If you have a healthy gut (autistic children often don't, but more on that later) then your body will be largely protected from mercury which you consume. The good bacteria (several pounds of it in an average adult) convert the organic mercury into inorganic forms and then you excrete it. No big deal. But inject it into a kid's bloodstream and it's many times more dangerous, and goes straight through the blood-brain barrier (which is not fully developed in babies and young children). It's also organic mercury, roughly estimated to be 1,000 times more toxic to humans than inorganic forms.

Between dentistry, pollution, and vaccines, pretty much every kid has to deal with major metals exposures. But most kids are still fine because they can get rid of these metals as they come in. Autistic children can't do that, for any of the following reasons:

genetic differences in a protein which carries (or fails to carry) mercury out of the brain

genetic differences in glutathione production

genetic differences in testosterone levels

genetic differences in estrogen levels

genetic differences in metallothionein production

viruses in the gut

yeast and other fungus in the gut

Clostridium difficile and other harmful bacteria in the gut

leaky gut syndrome

As Drs. Mark and David Geier and Dr. Boyd Haley (former chairman of the Chemistry Department at the University of Kentucky) have shown, testosterone increases the neurotoxicity of mercury, while estrogen is protective against neuron death from mercury. Testosterone and mercury also mutually trap each other in large tangles of molecules, preventing either substance from leaving the body, which is why aggression and precocious sexual behaviors are more prevalent in mercury-poisoned children. These facts help explain why 4 times as many boys have autism than girls, why more boys have ADHD, and why boys are now as much as two grade levels behind girls in some states.

Glutathione and metallothionein are chemicals produced by the liver which bind to metals and help them to be excreted. Glutathione levels are generally inversely related to testosterone levels. High testosterone levels usually indicate that less glutathione is available to remove metals, creating a vicious circle where metals increase testosterone, testosterone decreases glutathione, and insufficient glutathione allows metals to be retained, further increasing testosterone....

The reason the health of the gut (intestines) is so critical is that when the liver filters something toxic out of the bloodstream, it attempts to get rid of it by sending it out in the bile. The liver thinks these toxins will then exit the body, but in fact, that all depends on whether the good bacteria are present in sufficient numbers to neutralize the toxins. Bacteria such as acidophilus, bifidus, and others actually convert organic mercury (which would simply be re-absorbed) into an inorganic form (which is eliminated). It's a case of symbiosis: the good bacteria protect their own home, the human they live in, by assisting that human in eliminating poisons.

Leaky gut syndrome is when the situation in the digestive tract has been very bad for so long that the lining of the intestine is eroded, and foreign particles travel straight into the bloodstream. In particular, it turns out that gluten and casein (wheat and milk protein, respectively) break down during digestion to form opiate-like substances. These opioids are produced in everyone, but they are not supposed to go through the intestinal wall at that stage of digestion. If, however, you've got an intestinal wall like Swiss cheese, the opiate-like molecules go straight into the blood-- and the child is literally drugged.

A lot of autistic parents say their child will only eat carbs and dairy. Well, this is why. They have a sort of addiction to these weird proteins that wind up in their blood. Many parents begin the journey of recovery by gradually putting their child on the GFCF (Gluten-Free Casein-Free) diet. One mother who did this cold turkey said that her son screamed for two weeks solid when they took away the bread, pasta, and dairy (she did not recommend going cold turkey!). She said she got on her internet support boards crying every day, saying she couldn't do it. But at the end of the two weeks, her son's crying stopped, and he began to talk.

That mom's name is Julie Berle. You can see before and after video of her son Baxter, who is now indistinguishable from normal kids, in the first video at this Recovered Autistic Children page. Diet was not enough in Baxter's case; they also did chelation.

"Chelation" is the removal of heavy metals using a drug. If you go to your pediatrician and they do a test and find out your child has very high lead levels, they'll say "Oh my gosh! We've got to get your kid to the hospital for chelation!" And you'll go and have IV chelation using one of three drugs: DMSA, DMPS, or EDTA.

If, on the other hand, your kid has sky-high levels of mercury, arsenic, uranium, cadmium, antimony, tin, or aluminum (or even all of those), they'll go "Well, the lead levels look fine," and that'll be the end of it. They don't chelate anything but lead, even though mercury is considerably more neurotoxic than lead.

Now they're trying to say chelation is dangerous. Not dangerous if you chelate lead, and yet dangerous if you chelate mercury. Even though the two procedures can be done in exactly the same way using the same drugs at the same dosages. Uh-huh.

Actually, the doctors who are treating autism and recovering children are considerably safer than the hospital staff who treat lead poisoning. Alternative doctors often load up a child on minerals such as zinc, iron, and copper, because these can be depleted along with harmful metals. They also try to heal the child's gut before beginning chelation, to insure that freed-up toxic metals will be properly excreted, and not just float around in the body. They've developed a transdermal form of DMSA (think "the patch"), which is FDA-approved for use in children. You can chelate more slowly and with less trauma to the child that way.

There was an autistic boy who died following chelation a couple of years ago, which was publicized to the effing hilt by mainstream medicine. But that doctor was not a DAN doctor, nor familiar with their methods. Defeat Autism Now is a group that developed a treatment protocol and trains doctors in things like the GFCF diet, anti-virals and anti-fungals, chelation, etc. The doctor involved in the boy's death was using the wrong kind of EDTA at the wrong dosage, and screwed up the calcium levels so badly that this kid died of myocardial infarction. DAN doctors, if they do use EDTA (which seems to be rarely), add magnesium to balance out the rise in blood calcium levels. In short, the alternative medical doctors know what the hell they're doing, but the doctor involved in that child's death did not. Anyway-- the entire issue is easily avoided by using DMSA or DMPS, which have never caused any child's death. Again, DMSA is FDA-approved for chelation of metals in children, and is used thousands of times per year by mainstream doctors to remove lead from poisoned kids. There is also a transdermal form of DMPS used by hundreds of families.

The folks at the NIH, FDA, CDC, Merck, etc, are now faced with declining autism rates in states which reduced thimerosal (mercury) in vaccines. (And by the way, in most of the country thimerosal is still used in numerous vaccines, and mercury exposures have fallen by less than half of what they were in the 90's. It is patently NOT TRUE that mercury is gone from our vaccines.) The medical establishment is additionally faced with children who are "formerly autistic," who recovered following chelation of heavy metals. Doctors regularly test the urine of children undergoing chelation and find that metals just pour out of them, and the more metal comes out, the more the child improves cognitively and socially. I would say we've got all the proof we need that metals, but mercury in particular, are the cause of autism.

My pediatrician once said that anyone suggesting that autism is curable is preying upon vulnerable parents by giving them false promises. This is a claim that can be trotted out whenever anyone finds a treatment that the mainstream doesn't believe in. People who suggest treating lymphoma with IV vitamin C could be accused of "preying upon vulnerable cancer patients with false promises"-- and never mind what was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The "false promises" accusation is usually a flat-out attempt to silence anyone who wants to explore a treatment that doesn't profit Big Pharma, and isn't under the control of the American Medical Association (may they rot in hell). I'm not preying upon anyone, but they sure are covering their asses.

You can find further stories of recovery from autism, often with before and after video of the child, here:

March 27, 2008

No, seriously! No sarcasm in this post. We are in for one hell of a painful transition, but the end result is a better life than we have now, in many respects.

In the future, food will be mostly local:

Food will be fresher

More food will be organic

More animals will be free range

Small farmers will no longer be in poverty

More produce will be of heirloom varieties

Produce, eggs, and cheeses will be more varied

Small-scale processing means no artificial food additives

Most of that means better flavor, more vitamin content, more mineral content, and fewer pesticides, preservatives, colorings, and so on. This is one reason Americans will be healthier and will feel better. It doesn't mean everyone has to garden or can their own salsa and tomato sauce, but these foods will be produced in the community. Meanwhile this also means less cruelty to animals and less harm to the environment from animal feed lots.

On a lighter note, I can't wait to eat eggplants that honestly look like eggs, tomatoes that look like lemons, red garlic, and things I'd never heard of before, such as rice peas. Supermarkets have given us a cramped, limited idea of the fruit and vegetable world, in which tomatoes are always red, and eggplants are always purple. Backyard and local farmers are sure to be far more daring and plant certain veggies just for fun. (Check out the Peter Pepper.) Consider that at rareseeds.com they divide their tomato varieties into categories: green (13 kinds), orange (9 kinds), pink (29 kinds), purple (15 kinds), red (66 kinds), striped (20 kinds), white (10 kinds), and yellow (13 kinds).

In the area of food, there are previous examples of how the food supply eventually improves following a crisis. Cuba suffered a crippling loss of oil imports and a massive decline in GDP when the Soviet Union failed. People went hungry and malnutrition was common for about 2 years, but since then 85% of their food has been locally produced and entirely organic. They have less hypertension, fewer heart attacks, less diabetes, less cancer, and so forth. Life expectancy is now higher than before the crisis.

On to the next topic. We will have to manufacture real, useful things locally:

Butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers will have better morale than Dilbert

Kids & parents will not have to go $100,000 into debt to buy a degree an entry ticket into the middle class

More people will be self-employed

Money will stay in the area

More children will understand their parents' jobs and recognize adults' skills

Household items will last longer, and less will go to landfills

Less harm to the environment from diesel exhaust

No exploitation of sweatshop labor in the developing world

We'll have more respect for local artisans, and what we buy will be of better quality. (A person might swindle a Wal-Mart customer 15,000 miles away, but you won't swindle your neighbor.) No longer will the upper management of multinational corporations be taking our money and sending it to Switzerland or the Caymans, either; the community's wealth will stay in the community.

Some subdivisions will gain shops, farmer's markets, and very small schools

You'll get to know most people in your neighborhood

Equipment and tools will be shared, reducing expense

Bartering will reduce expenses (e.g. your kid's old clothes for a neighbor's home canned goods)

People will engage in small acts of kindness and charity

Unlike many of the men who write about peak oil and economic collapse and seem to feel we will descend into dog-eat-dog, Mad Max-style carnage, I think people will become a lot more decent. People are naturally both empathetic and altruistic, but only in person; there is no guarantee of this at a distance, or when the victims are anonymous. People who would never donate to a charitable non-profit (too abstract) will nonetheless find themselves donating eggs or firewood or slippers to an elderly lady down the block. People like James Howard Kunstler mostly forget about the existence of women, but clearly we will be the ones in charge of creating order in our neighborhoods in the midst of a crisis. Usually it's a woman who is head of the family, in my observation. Furthermore, we all know it's better to run across a male bear than a female bear with cubs in tow, don't we? And I can't see women neglecting the young, the old, or the disabled.

Then there are the health benefits:

Less depression, osteoporosis, hormonal dysfunction, and cancer, due to more sun exposure

Trans-fats can't be made in the kitchen (hurrah!)

Neither can MSG, aspartame, or high-fructose corn syrup

We will all walk and bike a lot more

We will often forgo high-tech medical care for alternative medicine, which is superior for most chronic disease and for preventive purposes

Better mental health from creative and productive activity, less isolation, helping others, and having a community safety network

Healthier gut bacteria means a decrease in all auto-immune disease, such as allergies, eczema, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, various digestive diseases, and perhaps even lupus and multiple sclerosis. It also means a better uptake of minerals, more serotonin production (90 to 95% of your serotonin is in your intestines), slower uptake of sugars, and better utilization of fats and proteins.

Meanwhile, doctors will have to focus on real emergencies, and not on prescribing enough Lipitor to meet this month's quota and get that free trip to Bermuda (courtesy Pfizer). I should also point out that school shootings will be a thing of the past, as we will no longer have the resources to prescribe amphetamines, pseudo-cocaine, and SSRI's to millions of children.

There are other benefits to education:

Small schools, very small work groups

More parental control, not just "involvement" (meaning homework enforcement)

Less red tape, fewer dehumanizing rules imposed on students

No standardized testing

Far less age segregation

More homeschooling and tiny co-ops

Shorter days and/or fewer days

Schooling is the third largest government expenditure after Social Security and defense spending. Education funding will be hard hit by the economic decline, but it will force us to fire administrators, depend on parents, and begin to de-centralize our schools.

"Relocalization" is a peak oil term for many of the changes I've described above. If power corrupts, then decentralization of power should be a good thing. I just hope Americans can get back their autonomy, self-reliance, and critical thought-- all of which have been quite intentionally taken from us over the course of the 20th century.

March 13, 2008

The dollar fell below 100 yen for the first time in 12 years today
and hit a new record low against the euro amid fears in currency
markets that the US financial system is vulnerable to the recession
spreading from the crisis-hit housing sector.

With gold and oil
both hitting new highs, and troubled hedge fund Carlyle Capital Corp
lurching towards collapse, stock markets fell sharply as investors
feared that the financial turbulence was approaching a new level.

Less
than 48 hours after America's central bank, the Federal Reserve, sought
to shore up banks with a $200bn (£100bn) package of emergency fundings,
Derek Halpenny, currency economist at BTM-UFJ, warned that "we are
entering dollar crisis mode".

Let me insert some ways to protect yourself here:

Buy silver bullion coins (such as American Silver Eagles or Canadian Silver Maple Leafs). You can buy small amounts at some jeweler's and there are a few coin dealers in southeast Michigan. If you can scrabble together about $2400 (as of March 13) you can get 100 coins by calling Monex. Do Not Buy Paper Equivalents, get the physical silver. The price will only go up.

Buy dried pasta. Also canned tuna, canned soup, sacks of white rice and sugar and popcorn. The price will only go up.

Consider getting a chest freezer. Freezing your veggies and berries is easier than canning. The price will only go up.

Plant food in your yard... lots of it.

Buy your mason jars, lids, and rings today (there may be shortages at some point).

If you have room in your basement, might as well buy extra shampoo and TP. The price will only go up.

Get a 5-gallon gas can (or two). Whether to keep it full of gas or not, I don't know, because it could pose a hazard. But if any regional gas shortages occur, gas cans will be in short supply, not just gas.

Accept any hand-me-down clothes, even in much larger sizes than your kids are in now, or even buy that shirt in the next 2-3 sizes and stick them in the closet. The price will only go up.

If you get the urge to shop, browse survivalist & camping sites for wind-up flashlights, solar lanterns, military surplus wool blankets, or whatever. Better than tchotchke, right?

Get some blackout-friendly entertainment: cheap paperbacks at garage sales, playing cards or board games, sudoku and crossword collections. Our electric system isn't going to get better.

Inflation will be our worst problem. Inflation is really a synonym for currency depreciation: when your paper dollars lose value, it takes more of them to buy real things. There is something called the US dollar index or USD index, which measures what a dollar is worth vs. other major currencies. When I started watching it, it was 83 or so, and people were saying that if it fell below 80 then the dollar would plummet in value, crash, collapse, or whatever lingo you prefer. That, thankfully, has not happened (yet). Today it's below 72, but the decline has been orderly:

At the start of the housing bubble in 2001, the USD was at around 115 and even 120. At the start of the Iraq war it was at 98. As I write this we're at 71.91. Some financial commentators whom I respect are estimating that it will continue to fall to 40 or 45, while John Williams of Shadow Stats, whose data everyone uses, says the dollar will go to zero and the currency will be replaced. This is because Mr. Williams believes we will experience severe hyperinflation, even worse than in Germany in the 1920's. (In Germany people hauled their cash in wheelbarrows, because it took so much crappy paper to buy anything. Reportedly, thieves would dump out the paper and run off with the wheelbarrow.)

Apparently, hyperinflationary collapses occur about every two centuries, going back to 1200 or even before. The last major wave of hyperinflation brought about the American and French revolutions. Ultimately it's the food shortages caused by currency collapse -- remember "let them eat cake"? -- which bring about revolution. Of course, the people don't always revolt. History indicates that waves of hyperinflation end in one of three ways: war, famine, and plague. Nice, eh? Smaller instances of hyperinflation can end by adopting the currency of another nation, but today all major currencies are suffering the same inflation: dollar, euro, yen, yuan, ruble, etc.

I don't know how it will happen in America or how bad it will be. But I do know that all prices will continue to rise, and food prices will rise faster than anything else except perhaps gasoline. Food will be the issue. In the Soviet Union and in Cuba people have survived economic collapses by growing food communally, but I fear that Americans would camp out in parking lots outside empty stores, waiting for a government truck to arrive. (You'd think after Katrina we'd all know that the government is not going to save us, not even when our lives are at stake.) Stack up the boxes of dried pasta, fill up the buckets of sugar and wheat, tear up the lawn and put in a bed of perennial sunflowers. Heck, you could go to Costco and buy a few cases of cheap whiskey, which is always good to barter with. (Or to use, you know... medicinally.)

The Fed had to decide between letting the banks and hedge funds go bankrupt or letting the dollar collapse, and they chose to destroy the currency and save Wall Street. Read about any currency disaster in history and you will always find that food was the core problem for the man and woman on the street. So wear that survivalist badge proudly and STOCK UP!

March 12, 2008

My kids may not attend school, but nonetheless I'm very aware of the impending financial disaster facing many public schools. It's like a quintuple-whammy of Very Bad Things coming down the pike:

Falling state and local government revenues, resulting in budget cuts

A a recent tripling of diesel prices (busing costs are 2nd only to payroll)

A sudden inability for local governments to borrow money

The freezing of some school investment accounts, causing cash flow problems

Major inflation, meaning everything tangible is escalating in price

And so we come to my suggestion: fire school administrators. Not every single one, but a good 3/4 of them.

John Taylor Gatto, in his book "A Different Kind of Teacher," calculates that New York state spent 51% of all money earmarked for public schools on administration costs (again, this was at the state level). At the local school level, another half of the remaining funds were given to administrators. Only a quarter of the money was spent on teachers, classrooms, and supplies, or what most people think of as "school".

Administrators police the top-down, centralized, and industry-controlled school agenda. If the Carnegie Foundation wants more control over schools, they must increase supervision of teachers and restrict their autonomy. They must also restrict students' freedom, policing their speech, clothing, time outside school, and so on. All this policing of students and teachers requires administrators, and we've got a hell of a lot more of them than we had 50 years ago, or even 20 years ago.

Of course, if you let administrators go, then how are schools going to handle all that standardized testing? Simple: stop testing. Testing is supposedly about quality control and improvement of schools, but what I'm talking about is a full-on crisis in which you're doing good if the building is heated, the buses are running, and you've kept it to <35 students per class. Forget testing. Most states would save tens of millions of dollars right off the bat, not including what they could save in administrator salaries.

Administrators also review teacher performance and okay their lesson plans and so forth. Stop doing that too. If a teacher is considered in any sense qualified, that should include being able to design lesson plans, for crying out loud. New teachers could be mentored to senior teachers, if need be. Let parents evaluate what their children are (or are not) learning. Yes, they are capable of that. It's just that our current system pats them on their little heads and tells them not to be involved in their child's education, because the school will handle that without their input, and frankly their input is far from invited.

Administrators handle disciplinary cases... but of course, the disciplinary system itself is usually a bureaucratic, paperwork-heavy, labyrinthine structure which would be better handled by one adult with an ability to relate to children than by hordes of Vice Principals toting Codes of Conduct.

Fire them, I say.

Superintendents from across California have been all over the papers bemoaning the recent 10% budget cut to education. "I just don't know where we can make cuts," they whine. Of course they don't! They're administrators! Ask a hamstrung, micro-managed teacher with 7 bosses where they should make cuts-- I dare you.

Homeschoolers have a stake in this, too, because the worse off the schools are financially, the more they will resent students who leave school to learn at home. If you're the principal of a school in New York state, and three of your students leave to be homeschooled, that's a $45,000 loss annually. You might have to let a staff member go. Isn't it likely that principals and teachers will make it more difficult to homeschool once they are scrabbling for every last dollar?

The whole time homeschooling has been legal in most states, schools have been relatively well off financially. Under Clinton the economy did fairly well, and during the 2001-2007 housing bubble, local government revenues went up substantially every year in much of the country. (Higher property values mean higher property taxes, and that's the main source of revenue for local government; much of that filtered down to the schools.)

Therefore, I don't feel that homeschooling has really been tested. On lefty blogs you'll often hear that homeschooling is snobby and selfish, a privilege for the rich. Only one homeschooling family that I know of is wealthy. Most are getting by on under-the-table work, on an adjunct faculty salary, on the salary of blue collar jobs, etc. Clothes are bought at second-hand shops or traded, food is grown in backyards and food co-ops and comes from sales at Trader Joe's, and cars are frequently on the fritz. Nonetheless homeschooling is seen as elitist. As schools deteriorate, I imagine things will get uglier and homeschoolers will begin to face harassment.

But the schools don't need to deteriorate, if only they fired the administrators and de-centralized. The Powers That Be will resist that with everything they've got. They've had a century to consolidate and control schools in an increasingly top-down manner, to dictate to teachers, to design curricula, to determine tests and textbooks. They won't give it up willingly. But maybe we can get a "meme" going, a rallying cry of sorts:

March 06, 2008

[Please note that I edited this on Saturday evening, to reflect my current understanding of the situation. The term "charter school" was confusing or incorrect, but correspondence schools such as Clonlara would be banned. Also, there are other options short of taking the appeal to the Supreme Court.]

A California appellate court judge has ruled that parents who homeschool -- even through a charter or correspondence school -- should face criminal charges, civil contempt fines, and/or attendance in a parental (re-)education program.

[I]n this case, the court went much further, essentially
concluding the state provided no circumstance that allowed parents to
school their own children at home.

Predictably, the judge involved had no familiarity with homeschooling:

Specifically, the appeals court affirmed, the trial court had found
that "keeping the children at home deprived them of situations where
(1) they could interact with people outside the family, (2) there are
people who could provide help if something is amiss in the children's
lives, and (3) they could develop emotionally in a broader world than
the parents' 'cloistered' setting."

As if kids in schools aren't cloistered? Where is their exposure to people not in their peer group? Where is their opportunity to observe the adult working world, and to converse with adults? Where is their freedom, autonomy, privacy, or opportunity for creative expression?

Further, the appeals ruling said, California law requires "persons
between the ages of six and 18" to be in school, "the public full-time
day school," with exemptions allowed only for those in a "private
full-time day school" or those "instructed by a tutor who holds a valid
state teaching credential for the grade being taught."

For homeschoolers in California, Hanson said, "there may be
everywhere from concern to panic, just based on not knowing what the
[ultimate] results will be."

This now goes may go to the California Supreme Court, or may be "depublished" so that it does not apply to any other family than the one involved in this particular case. That court will face immense pressure from the California educational system to rule in favor of outlawing homeschooling due to economic considerations. Each student at a California school brings in somewhere around $8,000 per year, and if they leave school to learn at home, the school loses that money. California schools are facing severe budget shortfalls which will result in enormous class sizes (since teachers are always fired before administrators). Newly unemployed parents will be suddenly interested in homeschooling as the top-heavy, management-heavy educational system falls into disrepair. According to the above article, there are currently 166,000 homeschooling students in the state, costing California schools roughly $1.3 billion per year in lost per-pupil revenues. Lost revenues will only increase as classroom conditions deteriorate, whereas criminalization of homeschooling could bring hundreds of millions of dollars back to the schools every year.

The court will of course consider the law, but they'll also be reading amicus briefs out the wazoo, begging them for a ban on home education. And in this time of financial meltdown, they just might deliver.

March 03, 2008

Over the weekend I read a series of posts about FDIC insurance which were less than reassuring. For one thing, the FDIC has never handled a large bank failure, and the paperwork is complicated. In the priority list of people who have claims on a failed bank-- that is, the list of people waiting to be repaid their money-- bank customers come in 4th behind certain government agencies. It's going to take a while to get your money back, if your bank goes under.

Another disconcerting fact: we have $4.2 trillion in FDIC insured accounts nationwide, but the FDIC has only $52 billion to its name, or 1.22% of what it insures. The idea was that only a few banks go bust in any given year, so the FDIC doesn't really need that much cash. Unfortunately when you're entering another Great Depression, bank failures pop up like mushrooms after a rain storm. What happens if the FDIC runs out of money? I expect that the government will simply print more, but again, that could take some time.

Most importantly, I read that in order for a joint checking or savings account to be FDIC insured, both parties must have signature cards on file at the bank.

I don't think my bank has signature cards on file for my husband and myself. Ergo, if Chase goes belly up we will lose the money in our checking account. Time to visit our bank! Anyone reading this may want to pay a visit as well.